by Jeff Coen
Sherlock already had Jack Townsend’s name in his ear at the time Strong told him the story, because the mother of Ferraro’s girlfriend had told him her “cousin,” whom she called Jackie, had gotten Paulie Ferraro out of the police station.
Townsend was a big and powerful man, Sherlock knew. Everyone in CPD at the time and in 2019 knew he had been Richard J. Daley’s right hand. “Everyone knew, you cross John Townsend, you’re getting dumped,” Sherlock would recall later.
Mary Mestrovic Murrihy already had told Sherlock about her experience at Area Three, with prosecutors doubting her and making her cry. Strong had corroborated it without speaking to Mary in all those intervening years. In fact he had the habit of calling Mary “the girl witness.” He barely knew her name. Strong had basically recounted Mary’s story from another seat in the room. The details were the same, down to what may have been a staged conversation about Mary being drunk, within earshot of her and her mother. Strong had watched a ranking assistant state’s attorney attack a teenager who was trying to help. What was the state doing demoralizing their own witness? Strong had been told there just wasn’t enough to charge the case, and that essentially had closed it.
Interestingly enough, Strong also told Sherlock he later worked in the 1990s with David Cuomo, the sergeant who was assigned to city hall at one point and who allegedly held the meeting at the Coral Key. It was a mass transit overtime detail. Strong said they, not shockingly, had at one point started talking about the Hughes case. Cuomo said he thought a relative knew who killed Hughes, Strong remembered, and called him in front of Strong. That relative had an “answer” that Cuomo passed along.
“Cuomo told Strong that ‘SEDAVICH’ (sp?) killed Hughes,” Sherlock wrote, noting the name may have been a final red herring. “Strong stated he was not familiar with this name during his time of being involved in the investigation.”
At around the same time in early 2019, Sherlock was able to locate Costello’s ex, who had appeared before a grand jury in 2000 and told Assistant State’s Attorney Linas Kelecius what her then husband had told her about the Hughes killing.
He went to speak to her at her neat apartment—where it was very noticeable that literally nothing seemed out of place. Sherlock found her to be smart and independent. She spoke about Costello with little or no emotion. I can’t tell if she loves him or hates him, Sherlock thought to himself.
No matter. That wasn’t why Sherlock was there. He wanted to walk her through what she had said to the grand jury and make sure she still stood by it.
She did. She was married to Costello between 1981 and 1985, and he had told her he had been with LaMantia and Ferraro when Hughes was shot. The delivery was simple and factual. She was being cooperative, though Sherlock thought that she was also keeping her Bridgeport guard up.
The woman said Costello would only tell her that either LaMantia or possibly another friend had killed Hughes, refusing to specify further or provide details. But then she added something new for Sherlock that he also memorialized. She “stated, emphatically, that she knows why LaMantia killed his girlfriend, Martha DiCaro, in 1979,” Sherlock wrote. “Martha and LaMantia were dating at the time of Hughes’ death. Martha was also the first cousin of [the witness] and the sister of Charlie DiCaro. [The witness] stated Martha was going to tell police that LaMantia shot and killed Hughes.”
The witness acknowledged she couldn’t prove it, but that’s what she wanted Sherlock to know. It was only at this point that she had shown any real emotion. The DiCaro family had always maintained Martha was in the process of breaking up with LaMantia when she went to his family home the day she was shot and killed, and the woman believed that one hundred percent, Sherlock thought. That much was clear. And she knew the details, too. She was quick to point out that the DiCaro gun disappeared, even though the LaMantias’ official story (once the masked intruders were dismissed) was that Rocky and Martha were the only ones home.
Sherlock added the information to his growing report, also noting for the FBI record that even the transcript of the ex-wife’s 2000 grand jury appearance had never made it to the official CPD paperwork. He had only found out about her from a transcript in the Gorman file. Sherlock left the apartment convinced she was telling him the truth.
Sherlock was looking for a witness who might be able to take things further; maybe Costello had let something slip to someone after the shooting, something like I can’t believe that fucker pulled the trigger. Sherlock still needed leverage for an eventual conversation in Sandwich—or, better yet, at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office or at the FBI itself. He didn’t envision charging anyone, but he wanted an official record to be made and for the case to be stamped CLOSED once and for all.
Sherlock interviewed more of John Hughes’s friends. One was a man named John Mahoney, who had the same story as most of the others Sherlock spoke to. But he did graduate things in one interesting area.
Mahoney didn’t see who was in the car, because it was too dark from his vantage point, but he was still sure he knew who two of them were: LaMantia and Costello again. He believed this because, instantly after the shooting, a number of teens who had been much closer and had seen the shooting said they saw LaMantia and Costello in the car. There was no question. People had seen them.
So why hadn’t that been communicated more urgently just minutes later, when police officers responded to the park? Were the teens that afraid of LaMantia? Or, more insidious, had it been told to police and vanished? Had those reports gone the way of so many other reports written on the case?
Mahoney said people at Boyce Field that night immediately said they also knew LaMantia and Costello had been at McGuane Park bragging that they were going to go down to Boyce to cause trouble. Sherlock knew other witnesses had made similar statements at the time, but there was no record of the kind of chatter Mahoney was sure he had heard.
Two other witnesses, John Joiner and Brian O’Malley, told similar stories as others Sherlock had spoken to. They insisted the shooting had been touched off by the ongoing feud between the groups. Joiner told Sherlock again about the Throop party and the fight on Halsted and estimated there were some fifty people at Boyce Field when the shooting took place, Sherlock recorded.
Most important to Sherlock was asking Joiner about the police lineup. Along with Raddatz and Russell, Joiner had been mentioned in original reports as viewing a lineup with Costello in it the very night of the shooting, and police had written that Joiner did not identify him. Joiner told Sherlock he recalled being asked if he recognized a few Bridgeport kids who were standing around in a room at the station that night. They were the same guys involved in the fight on Halsted Street, Joiner said he told police, and the same who had been taken into custody after being seen near Boyce after the shooting.
But he never was asked to view any formal physical lineup and told to pick out anyone from the car or the shooter himself, Joiner said. It would have made no sense to even ask him to try. As Joiner told Sherlock, and as he told police that night, he saw Hughes after he had already been shot and after their friends had started gathering around him on the ground.
Joiner had never seen the car at all.
High on Sherlock’s list to speak with was the relative of Dave Cuomo, the police officer who had run the Coral Key restaurant. Cuomo himself was by then too infirmed to speak. He was eighty-eight and would pass away just months after Sherlock caught up to the relative in February 2019. Sherlock needed the man to level with him, if he could, about what he knew. It seemed like every time Sherlock saw the man’s name in the police reports, there was different information attached.
Sherlock talked to the relative at his home, which was then just a couple of blocks from the old Ninth District police station on Lowe. He had become a lawyer but had stepped away from the profession and wasn’t licensed by the time Sherlock found him. Sherlock thought he appeared somewhat disheveled. But the man did have plenty to say, which Sherlock memorialized for hi
s FBI files.
“Although [he] provided relevant information concerning the events surrounding the Hughes investigation, [he] would not divulge the source of his knowledge,” he wrote. For starters, the man said he also was at the party on Throop that set the night’s events in motion. He attended with seven or ten friends, he said, and was there as things started to get out of control and the fighting began. Costello and LaMantia were involved in the fight with guys from Canaryville that he didn’t know. He said he wasn’t in the park when Hughes was shot.
The man said he didn’t find out about it until the next day when he went to the Coral Key for breakfast. Sherlock made notes and wrote out what the man said next in an FBI 302. The man told him that Cuomo, “a retired Chicago police sergeant, formerly assigned to City Hall, was having breakfast with … the father of Paul Ferraro, and … the father of Nick Costello. [He] stated he found out about the murder of Hughes by eavesdropping on [Cuomo’s] conversation with Ferraro Sr. and Costello Sr.,” Sherlock wrote. “[He] indicated he could not remember exactly what was said but he does recall the three men attempting to have a private conversation about the Hughes investigation.”
So there was at least one living witness who had seen the Coral Key meeting.
The man put Ferraro, Lamantia, and Costello in the shooting car but would not tell Sherlock how he knew. So many years later, Sherlock thought to himself, and no one ever seemed to vary from those names. The man said it was no big secret in the neighborhood anyway, but everyone was afraid to identify them because of their various ties to powerful people. Each of the teens was related to people who could make such problems “go away,” as the man phrased it. He didn’t tell Sherlock who he believed had actually pulled the trigger. He would only say LaMantia was among his friends who were crazy enough and who had bragged about having guns.
“Without prompting, [he] started talking about the murder of Martha DiCaro,” Sherlock wrote next. The man had just blurted it out and started talking about it, making the connection himself. Sherlock found his demeanor to be a little bit odd, but he kept going. Maybe he had some things to get off his chest, or at least figured lying to someone working for the FBI was probably a bad idea.
The man “indicated in May of 1979, LaMantia killed Martha because he feared Martha was going to break up with him and she was going to inform the police that LaMantia killed Hughes,” Sherlock put in his report. The gun in the DiCaro shooting hadn’t been recovered, the man knew, telling Sherlock that was no accident. In his report, Sherlock noted LaMantia had gone on to be tried in front of Judge Maloney with the known result. But the man didn’t tell Sherlock about the information that the US attorney’s office in Chicago had used—or tried to use—in the Maloney case. Federal prosecutors had told the judge in the Maloney case that this man knew Shorty LaMantia had paid a bribe. Whether he had told prosecutors that himself or if they had learned it another way would remain unknown.
“[He] stated ‘everyone’ knew LaMantia would beat the murder charge in court,” Sherlock wrote in his 302. “[He] stated ‘everyone’ was afraid to tell the police that LaMantia was in the car that was used in the shooting death of Hughes.
“‘LaMantia was untouchable.’”
17
“I REALLY WANT TO GO NOW”
Sherlock’s one-man surveillance operation had to end at some point. He had periodically parked across from Nick Costello’s house in Sandwich, sometimes in different cars, in the hopes of spooking him into talking. He knew Costello had seen him.
Eventually he made the phone call. When Costello picked up, he was hesitant and stuttering, Sherlock recalled later.
“Come on, Nick,” Sherlock told him. “You know why I want to talk to you.”
The two agreed to meet in the parking lot of a nearby restaurant. Sherlock pulled into the lot in his Cherokee, and Costello came up and got in the front seat. He was still nervous, shaking a little.
“Why are you here?” Costello asked. “Why do you want to talk to me about the case?”
Sherlock told him again that he knew the answer. It wouldn’t have been good practice to get into it in the car in a parking lot in Sandwich. The goal was to drive Costello to a police station so Sherlock could memorialize anything he might say on video.
Costello knew more than he had told people about the case, Sherlock said. He tried to keep it friendly and convince Costello it was ultimately going to be OK. The time had come to do the right thing.
“I don’t think you’re the shooter,” Sherlock told him. “I don’t think you did anything to harm John.” Those things were true. Sherlock didn’t think Costello had killed Hughes. His belief was that he was almost certainly in the car. But it was possible Costello was almost as surprised as anyone else that the shooter—perhaps LaMantia—had actually fired a gun and taken a life that night. Sherlock made a personal appeal for Costello to get whatever he wanted off his chest once and for all.
But he also had to level with him. “You don’t have anything to worry about right now. You don’t—now,” Sherlock said. “But I am going to talk with some other people in the near future. Those people might be the people who are guilty and might be giving you up. You’ve seen that game before.”
It was partially a bluff, mostly because LaMantia and other players in the case were dead. But Sherlock still hoped he could talk to Paul Ferraro and find out what had happened with the green Chevrolet. If Ferraro said something damaging about his car being used and Costello bringing it back to him, that could be an issue. That’s where Sherlock wanted him to know things could still go.
“You know what, I really want to go now,” Costello said in reply.
“Would you like to come to the police station and talk to me?” Sherlock said.
“I’ll get back to you,” Costello said, closing the Jeep’s door.
But it was a lawyer who got back to Sherlock and his FBI partners. The state’s attorney’s office eventually promised Costello’s lawyer there would be no charges. Authorities just wanted as good an answer as they could construct, to potentially close the Hughes case and end decades of questions.
At one point the lawyer called to say Costello was very close to talking, as long as he had assurances from prosecutors that he wouldn’t be in trouble. But eventually, there was a final answer.
It was no. The lawyer said his client, Costello, would not be talking to them.
Nothing mattered, including immunity promises. What Costello experienced, what he may have seen, and what he may have done—none of it was going to be revealed. If Costello had spent decades trying to avoid talking about the case, that wasn’t going to change for Sherlock or for anyone else.
The quiet of history tightened its grip.
Sherlock’s final interview was in late 2019. He had left CPD and the FBI by then but could still collect information and pass it to his law enforcement partners. He had been hired as an investigator for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, though his approach to Ferraro at that point was mostly his own doing.
Ferraro was then a member of the Chicago Fire Department and told Sherlock he would have no problem speaking with him about the case. Ferraro’s position had delayed Sherlock’s approach, as he wanted to have firmer information before asking about the case. But knowing time was winding down, Sherlock made the call anyway. The two met at the station Ferraro was assigned to. Sherlock knew he had little leverage, and was relying on Ferraro to simply tell him whether something had been bothering him all these years, such as someone borrowing his car, if it had been the one used in the shooting.
As the two men spoke, Sherlock found Ferraro to be very sure of himself. His demeanor reminded Sherlock of a detective on the witness stand in court. He was smart. His answers were quick and short, and he didn’t carry on beyond what he was asked. There was no drifting into rambling responses.
The theory that made the most sense was the car being brought back to Ferraro and then quickly removed from Chicago. Sherloc
k shared with Ferraro his leading theory, that Costello had been picked up after the shooting by another car of teens on Emerald between the two parks near where Ferraro had been babysitting. Kids at the time used the street as a highway north and south, mostly staying off Halsted because of traffic and more police patrolling it.
Ferraro knew nothing of that, he said confidently, and he would never let anyone borrow his car. He had only spoken to police the one time not long after the shooting, and never had again until meeting Sherlock that day, he said. He hadn’t seen Costello since 1976, Ferraro said, and didn’t even recall exactly how he had learned of the Hughes shooting.
So what about the quick trip to Indiana? That was planned, Ferraro said.
So, when had he left? Sherlock asked. “No later than midnight,” Ferraro answered.
Well, Sherlock said, when Ferraro had talked to police last, he told them it was about 2 AM. It was obviously an important point, as midnight was before the Hughes shooting and 2 AM was after. Maybe it was early morning, Ferraro said when challenged on the point, but police had looked at his car anyway. Whatever car had been used in the killing had been damaged, Ferraro said. There was nothing linking his car to the crime.
Sherlock hadn’t known exactly what to expect, and had mostly gone to talk to the fireman to cross the final moves off of his checklist. Ferraro didn’t give him anything he could use to advance his work. And there certainly hadn’t been a disclosure of any long-held secret about where his car had been the night Hughes died. The bid for a final bombshell ended. If what Ferraro had said was not truthful, it meant the wall of silence had carried forward across decades.